2Spooky Weekly 9/28

Production continues!  This week we have advancements in modeling:

lighting:

texturing:

and our 3D animatic:

2Spooky Weekly 9/20

Since last week we have taken our Animatic into the 3D environment and have created an animation block out. We have gotten the camera into the scene and have started blocking out character locations and movement. The following is what we have done so far.

One of the main critiques from last presentation was that we needed an opening/establishing shot to establish the setting and mood of the animation. We have begun to talk about how we could accomplish this within the confines of the time that we have. The following is an image of one idea of something we could do.  Working in silhouettes may be a way for us to quickly get across the idea without having to spend much time on modeling, texturing, etc.

Opening Credits Title Card

We have also been working on asset creation including candles and other objects to populate the scene.

The Lighting has also made some progress since last time. We have begun experimenting with the lights in the scene. We are aiming for the lighting style in the first image below. It is a bit hard to tell what the lighting would look like in the finished scene since we have no textures yet and the camera had not yet been set up properly in this scene.

The rig has also made some progress since the last time we presented. The weight maps have been created and are working pretty well so far. The hip joint has also been moved, as it was in the wrong place before (behaved as a spine joint rather than a hip joint).

2Spooky Progress

Our group name is 2Spooky and our group members are Rachel Clements, Nicole Jackson, Margaret Ramey and Lanece Finney. For our project this semester, we have decided to do a short story about a little girl in a ghost costume trying to scare a little boy. The following is an Animatic of our story created by Rachel.

We have also done some work on concept art, both for the environments and characters of our story. The story takes place in a haunted house so we are going to create the environment and render out a single image that we will use for our animation. There is no camera movement in our animation so using a render as our background will save us render time.

Rough Character Concept Art

created by Margaret

We have also begun developing the mood, texturing and lighting of the scene. We decided that we wanted to do a stylized, painterly style to the modeling and texturing of the scene. We also wanted the story to take place at night and be lit by moonlight. The following image is the lighting style that we are aiming for. Lanece is working on researching and implementing the lighting of our scene.

Also, we have been working on getting the characters ready for our animation. In addition to Margaret's concept art, Nicole has been working on modeling and rigging the characters. The boy has been modeled (partially by adapting the Mery rig's geometry) and has a basic rig in place. Currently, she is working on fixing the weight maps so it will animate correctly. The rig currently doesn't have any hair and the textures are just basic shaders but these will be worked on later in the semester.

The little girl's rig will be made by adapting the boy's rig and the ghost rig will be a simple one with Maya cloth to give the typical "sheet ghost" effect. Nicole has begun experimenting with maya cloth and it's implementation over a rig. The following video is an example of those tests.